Excerpt: More than 77 percent of manufacturers identified
rising health care and insurance costs as their most important challenge. More
than 90 percent of manufacturers stated their health insurance premiums had
increased, and a significant portion have had to increase employee copays (58.6
percent), reduce coverage (27.7 percent) and/or change insurance providers
(17.6 percent) to lower their costs. According to the survey, the ACA and the accompanying
uncertainties have had effects that extend well beyond premium payments and
have placed a roadblock in manufacturers’ efforts to invest and grow.

Excerpt: A study by Jon R. Gabel and colleagues at NORC, a
research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago,
found that 65 percent of employees in group health plans had higher-value
coverage that would be classified as gold or platinum under the Affordable Care
Act. At the same time, most policies in the exchanges are more generous than
what people have been buying for themselves in the individual insurance market.
Mr. Gabel found that 84 percent of policyholders in the individual market had
coverage that was less than or equivalent to the bronze level.

Excerpt: Mr. Myint is prohibited from steering her toward
one plan or another, and Ms. Munier, saying it's all too confusing, wants more
time to look over her options. For today, she doesn't enroll on the exchange. It's
a familiar experience for Mr. Myint. After starting Oct. 1, when the exchanges
went live, his organization was aiming to sign up 5,800 people by the end of
March 2014. It has a long way to go. "We have yet to see an application
from start to finish," he says.

Excerpt: But despite the arguments made by the
Administration, young adults don’t seem to be buying in. A new Harvard poll
shows that 57 percent of
young adults polled disapprove of the health care law. And with
good reason: The law will impact young adults’ wallets far more negatively than
older adults in two big ways.

Excerpt: As HealthCare.gov, the federal insurance exchange
being used in 36 states, continues to face problems, things aren’t going as
smoothly as we think in the states running their own marketplaces. First, the
state of Massachusetts
is starting to worry about its system. The Boston Globe reports:
With three weeks left in the year, not one of the thousands of Massachusetts residents
who need to enroll in new health insurance plans by Jan. 1 has been able to do
so through the state insurance marketplace that was revamped to comply with the
national Affordable Care Act.

Excerpt: Maybe an even bigger wreck is the
ultimate answer. The Obama administration can’t even back the “pass it to find
out what’s in it” mini-van out of its parking spot without running people over,
but in spite of that, Colin Powell thinks it’s time they took the wheel of a
double-decker health care bus.

Excerpt: How do you get your arms around the catastrophe
known as Obamacare? Is it even possible? At this point, I’m not sure it is. The
list of individual disasters which threaten to ruin one-sixth of the U.S. economy
and what has been, up until now, the best healthcare system in the world is
exhaustive, and exhausting. The examples I will identify here barely scratch
the surface. (Could this writer be correct, they just CAN'T be this stupid and
incompetent? If we believe that, then we have to figure out what the real game
is. Some say it's to make the system collapse so we have to go to the full boat
government controlled "single payer" system. Personally, I still have
faith that yes, when you are arrogant and ignorant enough, you can be this
happily stupid and merrily incompetent. And barely upset that things are going
so badly and all the late night comics are spitting out jokes about you night
after night. All it requires is that you live in a nice, insulated dream world,
surrounded by sycophants and still generally treated well by the media. I
wonder.... who could that describe? --Del)

Excerpt: In the past there have been all sorts of
presidential fibbing. Some chief executives make promises that they know they
probably cannot or will not keep. Before his reelection for his third term in
the midst of a world war, Franklin Roosevelt swore that he would never send
American boys to fight in a foreign war. In just a little over a year, he did
just that. Lyndon Johnson likewise before the 1964 election said he would not
send troops to Vietnam.
But once reelected, he sent nearly 200,000 troops to fight the North
Vietnamese; by the time he left office, over a half-million Americans were
deployed in Vietnam.

Excerpt: It'd be easy to conclude that school has never been
a more dangerous place, but for the USA's 55 million K-12 students and
3.7 million teachers, statistics tell another story: Despite two decades of
high-profile shootings, school increasingly has become a safer place. ... Since
1992, the rate of "victimization," which includes violent crimes such
as assault and rape as well as non-violent crimes such as robbery,
purse-snatching and pickpocketing, has plummeted, from 181.5 incidents per
1,000 students to 49.2 per 1,000 in 2011, the latest complete year for which
statistics are available. (Gee, what will the left do if it continues to drop?
~Bob)

Excerpt: The death of Nelson Mandela this week caused me to
reflect on a man who encapsulated the very essence of freedom. Flawed for his
initial use of violence and embrace of communism, Mandela metamorphosed into a
healer of the quite disgusting apartheid rule in South Africa. We should also not
forget the hand bagging that Baroness Thatcher gave PW Botha, and gentle
persuasion of the very decent FW De Klerk, in her attempts to help end
apartheid. Mandela said in July 1990 “She is an enemy of apartheid… We have
much to thank her for.”

Excerpt: Increasing class sizes by reallocating students to
the best teachers can improve student learning, says Michael Hansen, senior
researcher at the American Institutes for Research.

Hansen identified three problems in public schooling: The
best teachers are not paid enough. Not enough children benefit from good
teachers. Too many children have poor teachers. One policy change, he wrote,
could solve all three of the problems -- without requiring additional funds
from taxpayers: enlarging the classes taught by the best teachers (and
increasing their compensation). (But you'd have to get rid of the poor
teachers, and the unions and their liberal allies would go nuts. ~Bob)

Excerpt: I noticed over the weekend that lists of quotes
from Nelson Mandela had gone viral on the Internet. None of the lists I saw
included any of these – which say more about the man and the myth than you
could have learned by reading all the reports in the international
establishment press. (does not give sources. I approach WND with skepticism.
They always spin and I think over reach, but doesn't mean they are always wrong.
~Bob)

Nelson Mandela: Israel Is
Terrorist and Islamic Arabs Are Innocent By Julio Severo

Excerpt: With the death of Nelson Mandela, the mythology
continues that, under Ronald Reagan, the 1980s was the lost decade in dealing
with South Africa.
It’s the same old line — Reagan was insensitive to AIDS because he wasn’t gay.
He was insensitive to racism because he wasn’t black. And he was not involved
in policy, because he wasn’t very deep. All of that is just not true.

Excerpt: …Time and the politically correct era can never
wash away the Crime of Humanity foisted on the blacks of South Africa when
Communist African National Congress (ANC) ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘liberators’
sent hundreds to their death via the burning tire necklace. The crime of the so
many black brothers and sisters chosen for Death by Necklace? Suspicion of
being “too friendly to whites”.

Excerpt: There is a quiet anger boiling in America. It is
the anger of millions of hard-working citizens who pay their bills, send in
their income taxes, maintain their homes and repay their mortgage loans -- and
see their government reward those who do not. It is the anger of small town and
Middle American folks who have never been to Manhattan,
who put their savings in a community bank and borrow from a local credit union,
who watch Washington
lawmakers and presidents of both parties hand billions in taxpayer bailouts to
the reckless Wall Street titans who brought down the economy in 2008.
(Alas, I've heard this before. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Volunteers are planning to lay the wreaths
on December 14, but Hanson said there's still time to donate and there
will be empty trucks waiting for last-minute donations, right up until the day
before. (Doesn't hurt to get the word out to as many people as possible. --MasterGuns)

Excerpt: More than 20 House Democrats last week urged
President Obama to halt the deportation of illegal immigrants until Congress
passes a comprehensive immigration reform plan, but voters by a two-to-one
margin oppose that idea. Most already think the federal government is not
vigilant enough in deporting those who are in this country illegally. (Not PC
to say "illegal immigrants." PC is "future Democrats."
~Bob)

Excerpt: Ironically, the two sides agree in their
denunciation of crony capitalism, but
what they usually mean is that they're opposed to the other guy's crony
capitalism. Obama voted for TARP and then exploited its discontent, shrugged at
the taxpayers getting stuck for the bill of Solyndra and other green energy
boondoggles, then did his part to help walking conflict of interest Terry
McAuliffe become governor of Virginia.
The flip side of the coin too many Republicans are all too comfortable with
their own versions of crony capitalism -- loans and loan guarantees subsidizing U.S. exporters, state economic development boards, and Bob McDonnell's cozy
financial arrangements with donors, among other examples. While crony
capitalism isn't really a driving force behind our national sense of
diminishing economic opportunities, it certainly doesn't help anyone except the
cronies, and enhances the sense that wealth is built through cheating and
secret deals, not hard work or innovation. (Notice that this expression of
economic discontent is so generic that everybody's got a grievance,
and nobody thinks they're the beneficiaries.

Excerpt: French soldiers have started to remove weapons from
fighters in the Central African Republic (CAR). There was a brief exchange of
gunfire between armed men and French soldiers near the airport in the capital, Bangui, as the
disarmament began. (The French are helping rid the Central African Republic of MUSLIM
fighters (Selek rebels). In the past, France
had helped a Muslim regime in Africa hold
power against a Christian candidates. This is a welcome change. Is Europe going it alone now that it is clear that Obama
supports Muslim terrorists? Charles Martel, the 'Hammer,' who swept the Moors
out of Europe, was French. Perhaps history is
repeating itself. --Don Hank)

Excerpt: A century ago the murder of a British soldier in
broad daylight in London
would have been an act of war. In this post-imperial and post-everything age,
an atrocity leads to a task force which produces a report which is then filed
in a desk drawer by the undersecretary for something or other.

Excerpt: McDonald's Europe
has now converted 7,000 of their franchises into "service kiosks". Like
many American youth, European kids have found working at McDonalds beneath
them. Accordingly, McDonalds has cut their franchise work force in half
simply by employing "dumb terminals" in place of "dumb
juveniles". Customers no longer have to wait for a teen counter worker to
cease picking his nose or one involved in a fit of giggles with a fellow teen. They
simply walk up to the order terminal, push the same buttons found on the
McDonalds register and send their order to the kitchen.

Excerpt: One gift for which that is unnecessary is a book.
Books are ideal Christmas presents from the standpoint of saving wear and tear
on the buyer. ... One of these latter kinds of books is the recently published
"Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race" by Harry Stein. It is a
bracing dose of truth, on a subject where sugarcoated lies have become the
norm. (Any book by Dr. Sowell is a great gift. ~Bob)

Excerpt: The taxpayer loss on the GM bailout is $10.5
billion. The Treasury department said it recovered $39 billion from selling its
GM stake, and had put $49.5 billion of taxpayer money directly into the GM
bailout. (Bought a lot of union votes. ~Bob)

Executive-Order
Overkill: With increasing frequency, the president treats the
legislative branch as an unnecessary hindrance.

Excerpt: President Obama’s progressive base has been growing
impatient. Representative democracy has proved an inefficient vehicle through
which to enact leftists’ desired agenda; as a result, they are increasingly
demanding that their chief executive act as if the legislative branch did not
exist. Last week, the chairmen of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC),
Representatives Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), wrote a letter urging Obama to sign an executive order
raising the minimum wage for workers employed under federal contracts.

Excerpt: Patients are having to wait longer than six hours
in ambulances parked outside A&E departments. Last week alone nearly 4,500
patients were kept in the vehicles for at least half an hour because staff were
too busy to look after them. Figures obtained by BBC News under the Freedom of
Information Act covered the three months until the end of October, and revealed
that a patient in Wales was forced to wait six hours and 22 minutes, while
another in East England was held for five hours and 51 minutes. (Hope they
didn’t have a ruptured aorta…Barb. The single-payer system liberal want for
you. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Tens of thousands of hospital patients each year
are harmed by basic blunders in the use of drips, warn experts. An unknown
number are killed by such errors, which can lead to pneumonia, heart failure
and kidney damage. As many as one in five patients suffer because they get too
little fluid from intravenous (IV) drips - or too much, according to estimates
from an expert group at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
(Nice).

Excerpt: The distraught family of a war veteran who died
after being beaten by a dementia patient on an NHS hospital ward last night
branded his death a ‘national disgrace’. Nurses found Richard Bowman in a pool
of blood in the foetal position in bed with massive head, leg and arm injuries.
Despite emergency surgery the 86-year-old died 12 days later.

Hurricane Strength Storm Xaver SlamsUK,Northern Europe:
AIR Analysis

Excerpt: A report from catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide
notes that Winter Storm Xaver hit the north of Scotland last
night, Thursday the 5th of December, with wind gusts of more than 140
mph (225 km/h), recorded in the Scottish Highlands…..Across the northern UK
there have been gusts of between 60 and 80 mph (96 and 128 km/h), with 100 mph
(160 km/h) gusts recorded in mountain areas. …According to AIR, the flood
gates protecting Rotterdam have closed for the
first time since they were built in the 1990s, and the Oosterscheldekering in
southwest Netherlands is
closed for the first time since 2007.

Excerpt: Barack Obama is a creature of relativism, even
though, without logical consistency, this “post-American” president exalts
Islam. The longest chapter in Machiavelli's "Prince" is devoted
to conspiracy. No conspiracy—if it may be called that—is more significant than
the one enfolding in the United
States under its “post-American”
president, Barack Hussein Obama.

Excerpt: George Bush said, “If money doesn’t loosen up, this
sucker will go down” – I believe this was the greatest economic statement of
all time. This is why he backed up Paulson and Bernanke. Companies were
counting on the commercial paper market. In September 2008, we came right to
the abyss.